We are an experienced startup team looking for interns/parttime/telecommute workers for some exciting web 2.0 projects we are executing.

If you love to use Orkut, Facebook, Myspace, Twitter, Flickr etc. and would love to create similarly exciting social networking and Web 2.0 products for the web then here is your chance to be a part of action. Google.com came out of an initiative by two students to create a university wide search. We believe in such initiatives, where there is a compulsion to use the web for something useful.

Whats the deal :
You get:
1. Equity amount depending upon the time commitment you can offer and efficiency of your effort.
2. Experience in bootstrapping a Web 2.0 startup
3. Understanding how to create web scale, high usage, social networking site
3. Lifetime bragging rights, "I helped create this cool site you so love to use"
4. Learn and utilize highly marketable Open Source and technology skills like Ruby on Rails, PostgreSQL, Memcache, nginx, flex etc.

We get:
1. Self motivated force multipliers
2. Potential employee pool from which to hire after we get funded.

What are we looking for :-

1. Hardcore geeks into Perl, Python, Ruby on Rails and even Java or with willingness to rapidly learn Ruby on Rails framework.
2. Creative folks who create publicity material with Adobe Photoshop/Pagemaker/Gimp etc. including websites/brochures/copy during college technical fests and would like to try their hand at Human Computer Interaction workflows for a Web 2.0 site and learn in depth XHTML+CSS+Javascript, AJAX, Jquery, YUI etc.

Who should apply :-

0. These are telecommute positions.
1. This is not a training we are looking for fairly self-motivated individuals who can learn on their own without any hand holding. It doesn't matter if you have no industry experience.
2. You should have access to a broadband connection with no download limits and either your own personal PC where you can use Linux environment (or a Virtual Machine with Linux). Or a University/College infrastructure where you have private diskspace (for storing the code) associated with your login account on a secure file server.
3. You shouldn't be encumbered by any Intellectual property, Proprietary rights and Non-disclosure agreements to work in your own time on any project and be able to assign the moral rights of the same to us in lieu of equity into a startup company. We may at our discretion release parts of the projects executed under Open Source Licenses.

The above Internship positions were filled up and were for 2008 only, they are no longer available.

If you failed to notice it up until now, this is something that has been staring us in our face. What is it that differentiates a successful UGC/Social-Networking/Web2dotx site from a not so successful one. Its all about getting those conversations between the users going. Examples include Youtube's users replying to youtube videos with youtube videos, the scrapping and messaging features of 'dime a zillion' social networking sites. The network externalities of needing to reply to conversations, brings back users to the site with or without needing to e-mail them repeatedly. There are sites who are able to charge for letting the conversation happen e.g. matrimony/dating. Sites that charge to initiate conversation with total strangers(bigshots), e.g. professional social networks.
So certain types of conversation can be monetized.

I guess then it makes sense to promote and facilitate most type's of conversations and monetize a small group of conversations some of the time to create a viable subscription model.